What you should know

- [Narrator] Before moving forward, let's go over a few things that you should know and will need. In this course, you will be exposed to several different web technologies such as the DOM API, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and others. In order for you to take full advantage of the course, it's essential that you are familiar with some web development fundamentals things like how to create webpages, how to create and apply CSS styling rules, also you should know your way around JavaScript and have some basic understanding of the object-based and object-oriented programming methodologies. We will take an in-depth look at the DOM and the important concepts about the DOM and why it's essential that you understand it prior to writing code to interact with it. At any time along the way, if you feel that you need to brush up any of these skills, I recommend the following courses which are also available in our library. The HTML Essential Training is a great course for learning the basics of HTML and CSS. The JavaScript Essential Training course takes an in-depth look at JavaScript syntax and many of its important features and manipulating the DOM. To complete the exercise examples in this course, you'll need to set up your development environment to work with jQuery, AngularJS, and ReactJS. So first, you need a text editing tool or Integrated Development Environment or IDE. Here's a list of some of the IDEs and the links to download them. I'll be using Brackets in this course, but feel free to use any IDE you are most comfortable with. The good thing is that all these software are free and work with all major platforms. You'll also need to download some JavaScript libraries. All of these libraries have two different distributions, one for production and one for development. The production distribution is a minified or compressed version and it's the version that you will want to use on your server. The development distribution is ideal for development because it's easier for debugging your code. I'll be using only the development distribution for this course. So, let's head over to the jQuery.com site to download the jQuery library. Here on the jQuery homepage, what you'll do is click on this Download jQuery button here and it should take you to a different page to download the library. Now, the library you see here is just the version 3.2.1 and this is the latest version and this is also the version I'll be using for this course. The only thing with version three is that it's not compatible with older browsers. So, if you are using an older browser, then you want to download an older version so that it will work with your browser. So to download the version here, you just basically click on this link here, do a right click, and select the Save Link As and then just save this file to wherever you want to save it to and that should do it. If you are interested in the older version, then you want to go all the way down to the bottom of the page way down here and click on the jQuery CDN here and that takes you to the latest stable versions for each major branch and so you see the version one, two, and three here. And if you want to get the exact version, you can also click here on the link that says see all versions of jQuery Core and that should take you to another page where it lists all the versions for each of these major branch. So, that's where you would download all your jQuery libraries. Next, let's head over to the AngularJS website. On the AngularJS website, you'll see they have a blue button here and this is not what we want. We want to click the button that says Download AngularJS which is the 1.5 branch. So click on the button and you should see a popup window like I see here, although I can't read the message in the top here where it should say download AngularJS. And so the branch is 1.6.x which is the latest version for the 1.x branch and you also want to choose the build either a minified which is the compressed version or the uncompressed version for development. I'll be using the uncompressed version here. So, you can just go ahead and click Download to download this version. Or if you want to download an older version, then you can click here on the link that says previous versions and that takes you to another page and it lists all the previous versions along with their specific download links. So, for example if you want to download the version 1.5.7, like what I'm using here, then you can click on this link here 1.5.7 and that takes you to another page and it lists all kinds of files here. And the one you want is towards the bottom here that says angular.js. Okay, so this is the file you want. The other one is the angular.min.js. This is the minified version or the compressed version. So to download this file, we just right click on this link here and select Save Link As and just save that to wherever you want to save the file to. Okay so next, let's go over to Facebook React page. So, go over to github.com/facebook/react. On the site here, you want to click on the menu in the middle here that says releases and that would take you to releases page and you can use any of these versions here. The 15.x is fine. I'll be using the 15.x version so you just need to pick and choose which one you want to download. Now, for React to work, you need to download two libraries, the React DOM and react.js file and the react.js file here is the main library and the react dom is the library that supports CSS so you want to download both of them. Again, just right click on the link here and then do a Save Link As and save it to wherever you want to save these files and you should be good to go. So finally, we want to download the Babel compiler so go over to the github.com/babel and on the homepage here, you want to scroll down just a little bit here and click on the link that says babel standalone. Click the releases link here in the middle and that should take you to the release page where you can download all your libraries. Again, the latest version is 6.x so you can use any of these versions, it's fine. I'm using the babel.js or I can use either the min version which is the minified version. It doesn't really matter which one you use. So again, just do a right click on the link here and Save Link As and you should have all of the libraries necessary for completing the exercise examples in this course.